I've been playing for over a year now and the ramp up really isn't bad at all- there are a ton of new players starting all the time, and the map continues to expand so new players aren't right up against old ones.

You can probably get a basic one room AI going in a weekend, and then continue to expand it over time. The great thing about this game is that if you "die" you still have all the progress you've made with your code, so restarting doesn't hurt too much.

With regards to the "ScreepsScript" idea- there definitely is a small amount of that but it's pretty minimal. There is also a huge community on the screeps slack network that makes it a lot easier to get into the game.

Its actually quite well paced, due to how you progress through the game in real-time. You start out with access to a limited sub-set of the API, since you cannot build all the buildings/creep parts yet. First you're required to level your room up by upgrading your controller, which to get your first room up to the max level, can take weeks/months of RL time. ( but the game plays itself, and is always running )

The API you use at first is quite small, and takes care of some things like path-finding already, so you don't have to re-build that, though you totally can if you want. Heres[1] an example of some logic to get all your creeps mining from their closest source. Not use-able in a real-world script as the actual logic is awful, but the fun comes from figuring out what does work.

You can check out the API here[2]

[1]https://gist.github.com/ggrochow/db8986d2627d02c992f65cc0cce...

[2]http://support.screeps.com/hc/en-us/articles/203084991-API-R...